Vegetarianism and the Environment

Caring for the Environment

The real movers and shakers in the environmental policy are not plastic bags, shower nozzles, recycled cans, or bricks in the toilet cistern. They are food, housing, water and land. No human behaviour has a bigger environmental impact than diet.

This page will illustrate the impact of your choice of diet on environmental outcomes.

References below

Meat and the Greenhouse Effect

Cattle and sheep are ruminants. This means their digestive processes happen in 2 stages with 4 stomaches. They eat grass and regurgitate it as `cud'. Which they chew a second time round. This process releases (by way of burps more than farts) large amounts of methane.

Methane as a greenhouse gas is 72 times more potent than carbon dioxide. And the methane released from 28 million cattle and 100 million sheep in Australia is staggering. But greenhouse emissions from meat production don't stop with the methane. There are also massive emissions associated with transporting animals and carcases, and much of the transport is refridgerated.

The following graph shows the production of greenhouse gases from meat products compared with consumer electricity and air travel.


A choice to switch from meat to a grain/vegetable/legume/fruit based diet is the biggest single action most people can take to reduce their impact on greenhouse gas production.

Climate Change

The International Panel on Climate Change has developed many models of how our climate may change in response to various policies. These are `what if' scenarios. The scenario that leads to the quickest stabilisation of carbon dioxide levels and temperature rises is called B1. It assumes a reduction in meat consumption.

The reduction in meat consumption is critical to allow an increase in forests to soak up carbon dioxide.

Professor Ian Lowe, currently President of the Australian Conservation Foundation, has just updated his 1989 book on global warming (`Living in the Hothouse' 2005). In it he cites an estimate that a global switch to vegetarianism would release an amount of agricultural land double the size of India.

The IPCC B1 scenario doesn't contemplate such a massive change, but still illustrates the significant environmental outcomes that can follow from even modest reductions in meat eating.

Energy Usage

Most of us are aware of the energy we use driving a car or turning on a light switch. It comes from burning non-renewable fuels. But there is energy used in the production and distribution of food before we get it and cook it. Slaughterhouses use energy, cattle trucks use energy. To get the graph below we added up figures from the CSIRO Balancing Act report for beef cattle and meat products and compared them to the sum total for wheat, flour products and bakery products to get a realistic comparison.

The energy used for meat is even higher if you consider that bakery products don't need further cooking, but most meat products do. We produce and export vastly more (by a factor of about 10) wheat than we do meat, nevertheless meat production is a much larger user of energy - and you still have the cooking to add in.

Water Usage

Animal production not only is a powerful cause of greenhouse gas production, it is also a massive user and polluter of water.

Many people are surprised at this graph showing that meat uses twice as much water as rice. But the amount of rice we grow is not small - it has more calories than the 2 millions tonnes of beef produced annually!

Furthermore much of the water involved in the meat industry ends up seriously polluted and needs treatment. Abattoirs waste water and piggery effluent is some of the most highly polluted water in the world, requiring extensive treatment before release or reuse.

The usual measure of the quality of water is the BOD (Biochemical Oxygen Demand - the amount of oxygen required by bacteria for the decomposition of organic matter in 5 days at a standard temperature). The BOD of human sewage is 300 to 500 mg per liter, piggery effluent has a BOD of more than 5,000 mg per litre.

Land Use

Some 65% of Australia is listed as agricultural and 95% of that is devoted to meat production. Australia is gradually increasing the number of animals that are raised or finished by being fed grain in feedlotts and now uses 800,000 hectares to grow the grain it feeds these animals.

Plastic Bags and bycatch

Plastic bags are a `hot' environmental issue. Supermarkets and Governments are rushing to `out-green' each other in their support of alternatives. They point out that the 6.9 billion plastic bags represent an enormous waste and kill up to 100,000 innocent wild animals - including birds, seals and turtles.

This issue is similar to the issue of dolphins being killed during tuna fishing - the dolphins are called by catch, they are extra animals inadvertently killed during tuna fishing.

If our 6.9 billion plastic bags kill 100,000 additional animals, then that is 1 extra animal killed for each 69,000 bags you use. But now suppose you buy 69,000 fish in your plastic bags? The total by catch is the total of the by catch due to the fishing plus the by catch due to the bags. Typically the by-catch in commercial fishing is 40-50% of the entire catch - sometimes higher. This includes birds and marine mammals as well as other (unwanted) fish. That's a by catch of tens of thousands of animals - plus 1 for the bags. What you buy in your bags is much more important than the bags themselves.

Shrimp by catch can exceed the quantity of shrimp.

Fisheries and Aquaculture

Many people have read about the massive growth in fish production from aquaculture. This is a lie. Aquaculture is a net consumer of fish, not a producer. It takes between 8 and 11kg of fish used as feed to produce 1kg of southern bluefin tuna.

The Protein Myth

The myth that animal protein is essential in the human diet was based on studies of rats. The World Health Organisation revised its protein scoring tables in 1991 after research on humans demonstrated that plant protein was perfectly adequate.

Australia produces masses of plant protein - but exports most of it.

However, our production of soy protein has slumped in recent years and we now import 300,000 tonnes per annum - 4 times more than we grow.

Why not Change?

A plant based diet is better for you and better for the environment. It can make a big difference. You don't need to wait for Governments to act on climate change, you don't need to wait for big companies to develop a sense of stewardship and ethics. YOU can do something, and you can do it now. For more information on the steps you can take to reduce, or eliminate your meat consumption, see: Vegetarian information

References

  1. The critical information in this page comes either from the CSIRO and Sydney University Balancing Act report 2005.
  2. Information on greenhouse gas emissions comes from Australian Greenhouse Inventory 2003, available as PDF from Australian Greenhouse Office.
  3. Other statistics all comes from Australian Bureau of Statistics Year Books 1999 or the 2004 online edition.
  4. Information on the IPCC B1 model comes from Bert De Vries, Johannes Bollen, Lex Bouwman, Michel den Elzen, Marco Janssen, and Eric Kreileman Greenhouse Gas Emissions in an Equity, Environment and Service-Oriented World: An IMAGE-Based Scenario for the 21st Century. Techonological Forecasting and Social Change, 63:137-174, 2000. Their assumption on meat reductions are very small and conservative and not totally unrealistic. These assumptions are part of a total package and it isn't possible with the information available to say precisely what role the lower meat consumption assumptions have on the end result. But the impact on available land for carbon sequestering forests is clear.
  5. The best general book on Global Warming is Global Warming by John Houghton (3rd Edition, Cambride Press). This book explains the physics and other science of the issue with great clarity -- but you will need to work. Houghton considers that the only problem with methane emissions is stabilising them, which he regards as easily done. He doesn't consider that reducing methane is easier (just stop eating animals) and carries a bigger quicker payoff than reducing CO2. Lastly, he doesn't consider the intimate connection between diet and land available for forest CO2 sequestration.
  6. Ian Lowe's book is an easy read and gives a lot more hands-on advice Living in the HOTHOUSE Scribe Publications, Melbourne 2005.